Metro's Film of 'Romeo and Juliet' Opens at the Astor -- 'My American Wife' at the Music Hall

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Metro the Magnificent has loosed its technical magic upon Will Shakespeare and has fashioned for his "Romeo and Juliet" a jeweled setting in which the deep beauty of his romance glows and sparkles and gleams with breathless radiance. Never before, in all its centuries, has the play received so handsome a production as that which was unveiled last night at the Astor Theatre. All that the camera's scope, superb photography and opulent costuming could give it has been given to it here. Ornate but not garish, extravagant but in perfect taste, expansive but never overwhelming, the picture reflects great credit upon its producers and upon the screen as a whole. It is a dignified, sensitive and entirely admirable Shakespearean—not Hollywoodean—production.That distinction is important. Heretofore the screen has placed an evil brand upon the Shakespearean plays it attempted to produce. Its Shakespearean tradition has been uncertain and largely one of failure. Twenty years ago Theda Bara played in one version of "Romeo and Juliet"; Beverly Bayne and Francis X. Bushman were the lovers in another. Ignoring these period pieces, relics of the early silent era, we come to the Pickford-Fairbanks "Taming of the Shrew" (with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor) and to the Warners' "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which impressed me, at least, as a pretentious and overstuffed fantasy.It is obviously impossible to discuss Metro's "Romeo" in terms of such predecessors. It would be equally unjust to treat it in the prescribed fashion of drama critics: virtually ignoring the production and estimating the play by the performances. Here the production is fully as important as the acting, and one's appraisal of the players must be an individual and personal opinion arrived at without application of the yardstick of stage tradition by which we measure our Romeos and Juliets. There is no precedent for this version, no stage or screen tradition to guide us in our consideration of the picture. Logically, if not chronologically, it is the first Shakespearean photoplay.Hastening, then, into our report: Metro has translated the play into sheerly cinematic terms. It has omitted about a fourth of the verse—sometimes at the behest of the Hays office, which disapproves Elizabethan English, more often because it was repetitious or in explanation of action which the stage cannot show, but which the screen can and does. The best known passages, however, have been spared: the balcony scene has lost a line or two, but Mercutio's ode to Queen Mab is intact. The Nurse once again is called a bawd and speaks like a female Rabelais. No "additional dialogue" has been added. So much for the mechanics of the script.In scene and motion, the screen has gloriously released the play from the limitations of the stage. The brawl in the Cathedral Square of Verona splashes over a few acres; the masque at the Capulets' home is brilliantly colorful; the balcony scene, no longer confined to a miniature window and painted garden, has a lush midnight beauty of physical things which merges graciously with the spoken rapture of the lovers' lines. Verona, in brief, and all the places within it have spread beyond painted canvas and stiffly standing props to come alive in their proper proportion, tone and hue. In such matters the screen is beyond the reach of the boards and footlights. Shakespeare would have gloried in the medium.But there is more to "Romeo" than mechanical perfection, and if we seem to have delayed unduly in reporting upon Leslie Howard's Romeo, Norma Shearer's Juliet and the others it is because the best news should be kept to the last. Considering the performances en masse, they are splendid. Here and there we can expect imperfections: Miss Shearer was not at her best in the balcony scene, Mr. Howard came a cropper in a few of his soliloquities—there must be some inherent antagonism between the screen and soliloquy—Conway Tearle was a bit on the declamatory side as the Prince of Verona.Fortunately we need not value a performance as the proverb instructs us to judge a chain. With more pleasure, and with a sense that this memory will endure the longer, do we recall Miss Shearer's tender and womanly perverse Juliet during her farewell scene with Romeo before his flight to Mantua. Bright, too, is the recollection of her surrender to uncertainty, fear and suspicion before swallowing the potion, and of that scene in which she finds her lover dead beside her in the tomb. Miss Shearer has played these, whatever her earlier mistakes, with sincerity and effect.Mr. Howard is a pliant and graceful Romeo, overly weak perhaps in those moments when his hot blood should have boiled and he shared some of Mercutio's fiery spirit. But as a wooer and whisperer of Shakespeare's silver-sweet lines, he is as romantic as any lady on a balcony might desire.And then, of course, there is John Barrymore, revelling—poseur that he is—in the rôle of flamboyant Mercutio and dying with dignity and a Shakespearean pun on his lips. And Basil Rathbone, a perfect devil of a Tybalt, fiery and quick to draw and an insolent flinger of challenges. No possible fault there. And Edna May Oliver, the very Nurse of the Bard's imagining; droll, wise, impish in her humor and such a practical romanticist at that. She is grand. And Andy Devine as Peter—"I do bite my thumb, Sir!"—and spoken like a true Elizabethan clown with a frog's voice and canary's heart. For the rest a blanket salute: to C. Aubrey Smith for an admirable Capulet, to Reginald Denny for a carelessly proper Benvolio, to Ralph Forbes as a gallant and fond Paris, to Violet Kemble Cooper for a brisk and matronly Lady Capulet, to Henry Kolker for a troubled Friar Laurence.Talbot Jennings has adapted the play wisely, and George Cukor has directed it as briskly as the quality of the tragedy permits and the pageantry of the picture will bear. We reach the end of the film with this realization: the screen is a perfect medium for Shakespeare; whether Shakespeare is the perfect scenarist for the screen remains uncertain. Metro's film of "Romeo and Juliet" is a lovely thing; if it should not be well received the fault will not be Hollywood's. It will mean only that Shakespeare has become a literary exercise or a matter for a drama cult's admiration. Somehow we cannot believe that.